A typical or common dirt or earth boring ground auger has a central rotatable drive shaft, and has at least a first helical blade or screw flight attached thereto, such blade extending spirally along the drive shaft. In a particularly useful embodiment, such common earth boring auger presents twin flights of blades, and is rotatably driven as an auxiliary hydraulically powered implement by a skid steer loader or front loader construction vehicle.
A commonly encountered drawback or deficiency of such ground boring augers relates to their tendency, during ground augering, to deposit accumulations of loose earth at the periphery of the upper lip of the augered hole. Upon completion of augering and upon upward extraction of the auger from the hole, such loose earth accumulations tend to undesirably cascade downwardly into the newly augered hole, partially filling the hole.
Augering assemblies such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,887,300; 5,067,570; 2,061,218; 2,321,680; 2,709,572; and 4,364,441 (issued respectively to Meredith, Gilcrease, Watson, Houston; Ageborn, and Geeting) attempt to address and solve such dirt cascading and hole filling problem by configuring an auger assembly to present dirt screeding or plowing blades. Such blades are known to be attachable at the upper end of the auger's blades, and upon rotation of the auger, to co-rotate with the auger to disperse accumulated dirt from the lip of the augered hole. A problem associated with such known augering assemblies is that they typically require continuation of augering to a fixed depth matching the vertical span of the auger blades prior to performance of any radial dirt dispersion. Accordingly, such known assemblies undesirably fail to perform any dirt dispersing function when the desired depth of an augered hole is less than the effective vertical length of the auger.
The instant invention solves or ameliorates the problems discussed above by specially configuring an augering assembly to include an alternatively mountable and removable dirt screeding or plowing plate which is capable of dually functioning as a augering depth stop and, upon reaching a selected depth of augering, as a dirt dispersing element.